


The Emissary

by Cluegirl



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Literary pastiche, M/M, Natasha shares, Pining Steve, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-13
Updated: 2014-03-13
Packaged: 2018-01-15 15:13:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1309429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He's out of it now," she said without preamble -- a sudden shadow at his bedside in a dress the color of spring.  If he closed his eyes and drew his breath carefully over his tongue, Steve imagined he could still taste the faint trace of winter clinging to her skin like perfume.  "Chem is analyzing the gas that triggered his regression, and Fury has Stark working on a kill switch for the arm until they've figured out how to block the gas's effect."</p><p>"Good,"  Steve sighed, and opened his one good eye and summoned a smile.  "Is he all right?"</p><p>She gave a smile that was nothing like happy, and shook her head minutely.  "He forgot himself in the middle of a mission and tried to kill his best friend.  Would you be all right?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Emissary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Linkaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linkaria/gifts).



> This story is inspired by, and modeled off of the incomparably gorgeous, creepy, and terrifying story of the same title by Ray Bradbury. If you haven't read it, for Elvis's sake go find a copy of _October Country_ at once!

"He's out of it now," she said without preamble -- a sudden shadow at his bedside in a dress the color of spring. If he closed his eyes and drew his breath carefully over his tongue, Steve imagined he could still taste the faint trace of winter clinging to her skin like perfume. "Chem is analyzing the gas that triggered his regression, and Fury has Stark working on a kill switch for the arm until they've figured out how to block the gas's effect."

"Good," Steve sighed, and opened his one good eye and summoned a smile. "Is he all right?"

She gave a smile that was nothing like happy, and shook her head minutely. "He forgot himself in the middle of a mission and tried to kill his best friend. Would you be all right?"

"You told him I'm all right though," he demanded.

Again, she shook her head. "I don't lie to him, Steve."

"I'm not hurt -- not really."

"Fine. Get up and spar with me then, and I'll go back and tell him differently," she challenged, her smile trueing up as he twitched the blankets aside, or tried to. They got caught between the bed rail and the tray arm that was holding his tablet and water glass where he could reach them. "Idiot," she said, and pressed him back down into bed when he struggled to pick them free.

"You're the one throwing gauntlets," he grinned to hide the ache along his side. "Can't blame a fella for picking one up."

"Yes well, you're not the one the doctor's going to reprimand when she has to re-set your arm and fix all the pulled stitches." She smoothed his blankets down again, and hopped up to settle onto the narrow bed beside him. If she noticed how Steve flinched as she pulled his good arm up under her neck so she could curl against his chest, she didn't mention it.

And yes, she definitely smelled of Bucky -- the pomade he used to try and make his curling hair behave; the bay rum shaving soap he pretended not to swipe from Steve whenever he ran out; a shiver of bright metal ghosting through sweat, spunk, blood, and the cordite-sting that never quite left him. Steve tried so hard to lay still, not to turn his face into her slight warmth, just to catch more of that scent... but he couldn't say he was surprised to fail.

She didn't' seem surprised either, stretching up her chin so he could see the bright pink love bite there, and turning his face toward it with one slight, strong hand. The mark was new, still smelled faintly of the pizza they'd all had for lunch before the mission. Steve nuzzled close, and pretended the sound he made was a grunt of pain, and not a whimper.

"I got him to fuck me," she murmured into his ear, carding her fingers through his hair, tugging the short strands out from under the bandage as she held him against her throat. "Right there in the holding room, in the corner underneath the camera. I opened his pants and climbed into his lap and rode him until we both came..."

"Till he remembered you," Steve murmured, his lips brushing her pulse. 

Her headshake was minute and damning. "I wasn't the one he forgot," she said, tugging his face up by the hair and leaning back to reach behind her. "You were the one he needed to remember this time, Steve."

She was holding a pair of his briefs -- the bright red ones, with the Brooklyn Bridge painted across the back in black ink. They were crumpled, warm, still damp between the legs, and Bucky had bought them for Steve as a joke just that summer. They smelled of sex, and of being utterly, hopelessly lost, and when Natasha held them near his face, Steve couldn't even pretend that the noise he made wasn't a sob.

"He's still in me," she told him, quiet and savage as she slipped effortlessly out of his one-armed grasp and knelt up to tug springtime off over her head. "I saved him for you."

"Natasha..." Steve groaned, turning his face as she swung astride his shoulders. "The monitors-"

She scoffed. "Looped. Shows you asleep till the nurse does her rounds in an hour. Think I'dve left them on with him either? This is nobody's business but ours."

"Yours," he grudged, but he still looped his arms up over her naked thighs to rest on her narrow waist as she settled back against him, her sex swollen, slick and pink. 

And yes, he could smell Bucky there, musky, salty and strong as the earth, and when she murmured, "Taste him, Steve," he hated himself for it a little bit, but he did. It was all he had, this stolen, secondhand evidence, and hadn't he learned long since to take that kind of thing and hang on for all it was worth? Because never mind asking for more, you never knew when life would throw you down, and you'd lose even _that_ much of what you craved.

What you loved.

So he took the taste he was offered, wasted not a second nor a drop: licked the vessel shining-clean, squirming clean, clenching and shaking and gasping clean, and by God, he tried to be grateful for it.

Springtime was back in place an hour later, and Steve might've looked a little flushed with it, but if the nurse noticed it while checking the dressing over his eye and temple, she didn't mention anything. Natasha sat in the far corner, fingers tickling Steve's tablet, with her naked legs crossed under her short, bright skirt, waiting for solitude with iconic, pitiless patience.

"You should tell him," she said once she had it.

Steve scoffed, exhausted already. "Tell him what, that I borrow his girl when he's not around to say no?"

She didn't flinch -- his crudity shamed him more than it did her. "If you like. Or you could tell him that you only take sloppy seconds on the sly because you won't ask him for first go, which is closer to the truth."

"I _did._ " Damn. He hadn't meant to say it, but the truth bled out between his teeth before he could lock it back.

Well, at least she looked surprised. For all of a second, before her leaf green eyes narrowed. "You did ask him? When?" Steve glared, but his silence was apparently reply enough, because she twitched that unhappy smile at him again. "Oh. Before."

"I _asked_. He answered," Steve bit out, face burning with remembered humiliation. "Makes no difference when." Or where, or how drunk he'd been, or how lonely. None of that mattered against the look of alarm, of horrified pity, and kid-gloved _carefulness_ that had crossed Bucky's blurry face after Steve had tried, just that once, to kiss him.

She snarled a laugh, and something in Russian that needed no translation. Then, "And you haven't changed in all that time, with all the things you've seen, all that you've done? The world's different now, and so are you. James is not who he was then."

"Bucky's not who they made him into, either!" Steve shot back.

"And you think they had any reason, any damned reason at all, to make him love _you_?" She slung his tablet across the room, arching bright and hard for his head until Steve caught it, one-handed, realizing only after he'd done so, how lucky he'd been to make the grab at all with one eye taped closed and crusted with bloody stitches. From the appalled beat of silence, and the pink stain on Natasha's pale face, she realized her mistake a beat after he did, but then she chinned up into it defiantly and kicked the moment aside.

"He loves you, Steve."

"Yeah, like a brother."

"He. Loves. You." She prowled across the room, springtime fluttering around her thighs like butterflies' wings, like blown petals caught in a spider's web. "Why does that frighten you into idiocy?"

 _Because he's all I have left of myself. Because I'm not strong enough to lose him again, even the little bit of him I can say I have. Because if I lose Bucky then I'll have nothing left but ghosts, and I can't..._ He took a deep breath, closed his eye, and blew it out through his teeth until the twist in his perforated gut settled. "Why are you doing this?" he asked when he felt her hand light on his trembling knee.

She snorted, and somehow made it sound delicate. "Because Mohammad is a pig-headed, gun-shy fool, and the Mountain has no fucking clue where it should go to find him," she sighed. "And because for some reason, I seem to care for the both of them."

The tablet buzzed a text message against Steve's lap, and she slipped it out from under his hand before Steve had mustered himself to check it. Her smile this time was tart, but true. "Stark's finished the kill switch. He and Clint are inbound," she said, handing it back to him gently this time. "

Steve read the text and groaned. "Wonderful. Will you please tell the nurse's station _not_ to let the stripper come up with them?"

"Tsk. They're called 'Exotic Dancers' now."

"They're embarrassing, either way." 

"Which would be why Clint and Tony do it, I think." She leaned up close, kissed him softly, as if afraid it would hurt, and smoothed the hair over his new bandage as she withdrew. "He's not a fool, Steve. He knows the tells, he can read people as well as I can, can spot the vulnerability, read the weaknesses. If he doesn't already know what we're doing, he'll learn soon, whether one of us tells him, or not."

Steve leaned into her hand, sighing. "He won't believe it." Because Bucky wouldn't. Steve had always been the sure bet -- the third wheel that never needed grease or a tightening wrench. Always there to hold up, no matter what else fell off. Reliable, invisible, safe. Shame burned in his belly for an instant, but he pushed it away.

She shook her head again, kissed him once more, quickly, and turned away with a sigh. "We all deserve better than this." And Steve had no contradiction to make there -- they did deserve better. But the world never had cared much to give people what they deserved, and it was only the fact that she knew that better than him that kept the saying of it off his lips. 

"If they let him out tonight," she said from the doorway, cutting a glance backward over her blooming shoulder, "he'll want to come see you. I'll come with him. And we'll talk more then."

"Tasha."

"Steve." One twist of smile, the purest, the sweetest, the saddest he'd seen from her since they'd first begun this strange, furtive minuet of silences and stolen intimacies between them. "This notice, not a request for permission. I'm bringing the mountain to you. Tonight."

And with that, she left, the tap of her sandals on the hospital tiles pointed and deliberate, marking her progress in Doppler scale, ticking out the meter of the seconds he had left in which to find his courage, and to figure out what to do with it. Steve sighed, scrubbed at his sore face with his hand, and then let it flop to his side.

The shorts were still there though, gone chilly and tacky now with the cool hospital air. They'd been the closest thing to hand afterward, when Steve had needed wiping down too, and he hadn't thought to stop Natasha from grabbing them. Now stains on the fabric were beginning to dry around the edges, the three of them mingled and fading salt-pale against the crimson fabric. Hard to tell whose was whose, where one ended and another began.

Steve bunched the shorts into a wad and shoved them under his pillow. Then he lay back in his bed, pretended to sleep, and ferociously imagined Dum Dum Dugan in a chorus girl's outfit until his semi faded decently away. Down the hall, the sound of Tony and Clint arguing with the Head Nurse filtered a thread of exasperated normalcy through Steve's drowning tide of arousal and shame.

And if he grabbed that thread with both hands, wrapped it around himself and determined that he would wait until later to sort out what he would tell Bucky... well, who could blame him? Captain America always had made his best tactical decisions on the fly. And if it went badly... well, Steve Rogers could still do what he'd always done; hang on, keep swinging, and watch for luck to maybe throw him a bone.

It had happened before, after all.

Still. No sense sitting trapped in his bed and worrying about it. Not with Tony and Clint and not one, but _three_ Exotic Dancers come visiting, all annoyed that the Head Nurse had vetoed their margarita party and confiscated the blender and tequila. Not with truly awful hamburgers smuggled in Tony's jacket, squashed flat and smelling faintly of deodorant from resting against his underarm. 

No. He had his annoying, amusing distractions to entertain him now, and for now, they were good enough. Tonight, he would have visitors.

Tonight, and whatever dear and terrible thing Natasha brought back to Steve's room along with it, could wait.


End file.
